We discuss the biggest questions: "what's real?", "who matters?" and "how to make a better world?" with scientists, celebrities, activists, writers and philosophers. The Sentientism worldview is "evidence, reason and compassion for all sentient beings." It's a simple, yet radical, philosophy that's grounded in reality (naturalistic epistemology) and has compassion for all sentient beings (mostly human and non-human animals). Naturalism & sentiocentrism combined.
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Jonathan is an ethics strategist, writer, social change
advocate and public speaker. He is Executive Director of the Organisation for the Prevention of Intense Suffering (OPIS), a Swiss-based think-and-do tank that promotes the prevention of human and non-human suffering as our overriding global ethical priority. His book, The Battle for Compassion: Ethics in an Apathetic Universe, explores the question “What matters?”. His new book The Tango of Ethics: Intuition, Rationality and the Prevention of Suffering goes further in proposing a rigorous reassessment of how we think about ethics.
In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the two most important questions: “what’s real?” & “who matters?”
Sentientism is “evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” The video of our conversation is here on YouTube.
We discuss:
00:00 Clips!
01:00 Welcome
03:34 Jon’s Intro
– Molecular biology PhD
– Ethicist
– Writing “The Battle for Compassion” and “The Tango of Ethics”
– Running the “think and do tank” OPIS (Organisation for the Prevention of Intense Suffering) “Trying to put the ideas into practice”
04:41 What’s Real?
– A scientific family, physicist father
– “A naturalistic, mechanistic way of thinking about the world”
– “It’s not that there was no #spirituality at all… a #Jewish household that was more traditional than religious… Reciting things that I didn’t necessarily understand the meaning of”
– “…a brief phase where I did take things [religious prescriptions] more literally… but that didn’t last very long”
– “Seeing the world as inherently physical”
– “Not to say that the subjective doesn’t matter… the subjective is the essence of what matters”
– Maternal grandfather “I remember him describing himself as a Humanist… his way of saying ‘don’t take the supernatural too seriously'”
– “I think spirituality is an important part of life… but I don’t think of spirituality in the supernatural sense… I think of spirituality in terms of the experience… a feeling that there is an intense meaning possible in life.”
– “During spiritual experiences we might suspend the very rational perspective. You can’t really be fully plunged into a spiritual experience if you’re also trying to analyse things scientifically at the same time.”
– In circles with people, lighting a fire, reciting poetry… “it feels like a source of meaning at times to get into that other state of mind.”
– “It’s this dance between two very different perspectives”
– “How do we reconcile the need to understand reality as accurately as possible using the tools of rationality and science and how do we also extract meaning from our existence?”
– JW: Instead of a scientistic denial or a mystical reification of the subjective… a recognition that our subjective experiences are part of the objective world we all share… and are the source of its value
– Subjective experience is determined by the physical “but you won’t actually know what it’s like… without having experienced
it yourself”
13:25 What Matters?
– “Subjective experience… it’s the most important part of reality… the only part of reality that really matters when it comes down to ethics…”
46:40 Who Matters?
01:03:37 How To Make A Better World?
01:19:43 Follow Jon and OPIS
– https://www.jonathanleighton.org/
– https://www.preventsuffering.org/
…and much more. Full show notes at Sentientism.info.
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